Baseball Pitching Gun For Batting Practice

From the POPULAR MECHANICS June 1913 issue.

Dec 6, 2004

The automatic ball-catching and returning device shown in a recent issue of this magazine, designed to give baseball pitchers unlimited practice, recalls a baseball-pitching gun invented some years ago by Prof. C. H. Hinton of Princeton University. This gun, resembling a cannon in appearance and hurling the ball by means of gas shot into its breech from an ordinary repeating rifle, was not designed to take the place of a pitcher in a game, but to give batters an opportunity for unlimited practice.

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This gun was successful in that it would actually throw curves and throw them accurately, but there was one defect that could not be overcome, due to the "human equation." The gun never failed to inspire fear in the batter. That the batter would know just when the ball was coming, an electric wire was run to the batters' box, and by stepping on the plate the circuit was closed and the blank cartridge in the rifle fired. The average batter would step on this plate and then jump back about 4 ft., letting the ball go by. Another drawback was the fact that the hot gases soon acted on the covers of the balls and made them as hard as bricks.

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An almost unlimited range of speed was obtained by making the tube connecting the breech of the gun, into which the rifle was discharged, telescopic. The shorter the tube, the greater the force. Rubber-faced curving fingers, adjustable to any plane about the muzzle, caused the ball to curve "out" or "in," or "drop," different sets of fingers giving different degrees of curve. The inventor of the pitching gun came from England in 1893 to be a member of the faculty of Princeton University. He had had some success in athletics at Oxford University, and soon became interested in baseball. He had not studied the game very long before he noticed that pitchers, in giving practice to batters, did not pitch as well as in a game. So he set to work to devise a gun that would throw any curve at any speed, in order that a batter who was weak in "outs," for example, could bat against "outs" until he had learned to handle them.